I'm very interested in crowd-sourcing and online innovation communities. Currently, I'm conducting research on what motivates users to continue sharing ideas, developing concepts, funding projects and collaboratively innovating in these crowd-sourcing communities. Some of these offer monetary rewards to their users, which are obvious reasons for participation, but other communities don't. They have to engage their users in other ways, putting emphasis on catering for peoples' intrinsic needs.

If you are engaged in one of these communities of Quirky, OpenIDEO and Kickstarter, please share your thoughts on what motivates people to participate, share ideas, fund projects, create and innovate in these online crowdsourcing platforms? Why are they successful, what makes them good communities? What is your opinion on rewarding in these online innovation communities (monetary and non-monetary)? What is lacking in these communites and how can maintainers facilitate these crowdsourcing platforms?

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Jono Bacon, former community manager of the Ubuntu (Linux) operating system wrote a good e-book on managing communities called The Art of Community. It's good for the nuts and bolts on managing open source projects.

Humans are ultimately pack animals. We crave interacting with a pack, helping others and receiving recognition for what we do. Although monetary rewards certainly work, when I think of the endless people hours that went into writing and editing Wikipedia for free, it seems obvious that money is not the only, or even the greatest motivating factor. Recognition within a community seems even more important.

We are also competitive animals. Winning, garnering more points even if they only measure reputation, and achieving public "badges" of achievement are highly effective game mechanisms.

Finally, do not under-estimate the power of existing networks. Any service that allows users to easily link and communicate with their existing communities such as Facebook, LinkedIn or here on StackExchange will get a huge initial boost in membership and activitities.

I could answer for myself and I have to say for me it's the reputation system as others have mentioned. I have never been interested in creating content because the reward of posting something helpful to anonymous strangers such as yourselves :) never really appealed to me as I got nothing back in return or if I did, it was in the context of a comment in a post, which is a very fleeting reward that I couldn't really expand on. But I think the rewards of creating content make posting very justified on sites like Stackoverflow and Serverfault, on serverfault being a top user can give you access to an exclusive membership and being a top user on SO can label you a rockstar programmer that any company would be lucky to have on board. I think this long term and somewhat ambiguous and fanciful financial reward goal is better then a fleeting cash reward.

I heard a story recently on the radio about this topic, where children divided into three groups to perform a creative project over a period of weeks were given rewards to do so. In the first group, they were instructed that they would be receiving 100$ or so to complete the project simply on time. In the 2nd group, they were tasked to complete the project on time but the reward they would receive would be left a mystery until the after the project and the 3rd group was told they were competing for a prize with the other two groups and the group that would be receiving the prize would be the one that finished first. In multiple tests, The 2nd group would out-performed the other 2 groups, delivering more quality content on-time.

And I think this says a lot about the motivation and the desire to create content for communities.

But seriously, take a leaf from stackexchange. The idea of rewarding users with moderation abilities is a great one. Forumites always crave moderation powers, but by the time they have them, they've spent enough time to use them wisely. That means the rewards only help plough more effort and good work into the community - a big win all round.

I know this question is about motivation, but I have an additional thought about motivation in the form of what really detracts and demotes from what we've been talking about in a reward system. And that is cheating. I just spent a better part of the day today on Stackoverflow, proud of myself for raising 50 or so rep points only to catch a user cheating at the end of the day and to achieve in 10 minutes triple to what I was able to achieve in about three months. The cheating was obvious. I'll be honest, I felt slightly deflated. But on Stack every user is able to police and determine if they suspect cheating is taking place. All reputation gained is time stamped and visible to any user. In this case, it was obvious that across multiple questions the user was recasting votes at exactly the same time. I anticipate that this user and any suspected users involved will be promptly eliminated from the system to keep this important trust in tact. And I think this is critically important to any online community worth it's salt.